The email arrived with all the warmth and sincerity of every corporate email ever written. "Dear Glen, At [NAME REDACTED], we are always looking for ways to improve the experience we provide to our tenants, and your feedback is incredibly valuable to us."
That's always a dangerous sentence.
Because when a company tells you your feedback is "incredibly valuable", what they usually mean is, please click this survey so our dashboard turns slightly greener.
The email continued with a request to complete a short survey about my property manager, but there's just one small problem: I don't know who my property manager is.
I've rented the property for over two years. The rent gets paid. Nothing has broken. Nothing has caught fire. Nobody has accidentally demolished the kitchen. I've received the occasional email about inspections or routine notices, but if you asked me to identify my property manager in a police line-up, I'd probably end up apologising to six innocent strangers.
If I walked past her in the supermarket, she'd be just another person comparing breakfast cereal prices. Yet here I was, being asked to evaluate her performance. It's a bit like Qantas asking me to rate the pilot after an uneventful flight. Five stars. We didn't plummet into the Tasman Sea. Or my bank asking me to rate the person who approved my automatic car loan repayment.
We've somehow wandered into a world where absolutely everything must be reviewed. Coffee. Dentists. Doctors. Uber drivers. The bloke who delivered a parcel. The chatbot that transferred you to a human after only 17 failed attempts. Even experiences where nothing happened somehow require feedback. Perhaps especially those.
Real estate agencies aren't really looking for opinions anymore. They're collecting numbers. Somewhere inside a head office is a giant dashboard with colourful graphs showing "Tenant Satisfaction Index", "Net Promoter Score" and perhaps "Likelihood of Smiling During Email Correspondence."
The property manager probably has performance indicators (KPIs) that depend on people clicking little circles ranging from "Very Dissatisfied" to "Extremely Delighted."
Imagine that performance review.
"Glen says you're a nine."
"Who's Glen?"
"No idea."
"Have we spoken?"
"Apparently not, but he thinks you're doing great."
It's corporate theatre. The survey isn't really asking whether I've had a good relationship with my property manager. It's asking whether I can help populate a spreadsheet.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I replied honestly. "I'm sorry, but I have insufficient data to form an opinion." It sounds less like a tenant and more like a royal commission. Maybe there should be a seventh option on every survey: "I have absolutely no idea." I'd click that with enthusiasm. At least then the numbers would accurately reflect reality, which would make for a refreshing change. Perhaps silence is the most honest feedback of them all, anyway.
What struck me most was the irony. If I'd actually had frequent contact with my property manager, something would probably have gone wrong. A leaking roof. A burst pipe. A broken hot water service. The very fact I've barely interacted with her is probably evidence that she's doing exactly what she's supposed to do.
Good property management is almost invisible. Like good IT departments. You only notice them when they're not working. So perhaps the survey should contain just one question: has your property manager given you any reason to think about them? No? Excellent. Ten out of ten. Survey complete.
We've become addicted to measuring everything because numbers make us feel in control. If it can't be graphed, colour-coded or presented in a quarterly report, did it even happen? Not every interaction needs a rating. Sometimes a perfectly ordinary experience deserves the highest compliment of all: it was so smooth you forgot another person was quietly making it happen.
That's not something a spreadsheet celebrates. But perhaps it should.
